In the fall of 2018 I started teaching an Independent DR class on Marketing at Menlo College in the heart of Silicon Valley. Menlo College isn’t Stanford University and it isn’t University of California. It’s a small business college that attracts a diverse group of students, many of whom are the first in their families to go to college.

As a trustee, I was painfully aware of the school’s lack of visibility in one of the most visible places in the country. It is nestled close to Stanford on El Camino Real near an enclave of wealthy private elementary and high schools. It has been there for 90 years. Yet it goes unnoticed by the community.

I was also painfully aware of the lack of funds available for marketing. The school had experienced some challenging times over the past few decades and the edges were fraying.

But the board was coalescing around a new president and each of us vowed to do what we could to revive the school and position it for the future.

I figured I could use my skills as a marketer to help raise awareness of the school using the most inexpensive resource available to us: the students. I proposed a year-long class called Market Menlo College. The idea was to spend the first semester using my book, Get to Aha!, as a framework for teaching the students about marketing. We would close out semester 1 with an awareness campaign competition and as a class we would spend the second semester executing the campaign.

The board loved the idea and I set about making it happen. Ten students signed up for the class and dutifully read my book, sat through lectures and guest speakers, and took copious notes. Several weeks into the course, I divided the class into three groups and asked them to work on a project to develop a campaign that had the objective to raise awareness of Menlo College. I asked that the students provide a campaign name, a strategy and an execution plan. I also asked that each team present its plans to the board at the end of the semester and the board would vote on the winning campaign.

The Big Day came on December 3 and the board gathered to hear the presentations. The kids were excited and nervous. They were presenting to the board of trustees! They built PowerPoint presentations, they wrote scripts and they dressed up. This was for real!

All the presentations were thoughtful. All contained the lessons of the past few months. But one called Beyond the Oaks stood out as being more cohesive and thorough. Two young women, both of them seniors, Jessica Carlson and Caitlin Sorensen, were the winners. We had a big celebratory pizza dinner with the whole class and several board members and left for the winter break.

When we returned, it was all hands on deck to execute the campaign. The concept was to highlight graduates and the cool jobs they had in Silicon Valley. We would use them in a variety of ways including email marketing to prospective students, public relations to let the community know about the school, outreach to local businesses for the internship program, flags, banners and posters on campus, and the launch of the campaign at the school’s annual Oaktoberfest.

To accomplish this, the students had to identify graduates still in the area, reach out to them, request their participation in the campaign, interview them and video the session. They had to do the whole thing: project management, selling, pitching, creative, filming, scripting and funding. Several board members stepped up and funded the campaign. To align with previous work I had done with the school to provide the brand promise and tagline of Ignite Your Potential, we renamed the campaign Potential on Fire! In fact, I hired one of the stars of the winning team, Caitlin Sorensen. She has been a rock star in getting this project to the finish line.

Fast forward several months and the campaign just launched at Oaktoberfest. What a wonderful sight to see all the banners and posters with alumni stories. The kids at Menlo are a special bunch. They love applied learning and they work hard to participate in real world initiatives. This project that took over a year to complete is proof of their talent and commitment. By the time they graduate, they are grown-ups. They are working to contribute to the information economy. Silicon Valley companies are proud to hire these students because when they leave Menlo, their potential is most certainly on fire!

To hear Caitlin’s perspective, check out her blog post here.